PG&E's New Strategy to Stop CCA - Goldfinger Comes to Cali

Call it PG&E's "Goldfinger" strategy. Last week, Pacific Gas & Electric's manager of local government partnerships was sworn in as chairwoman of San Francisco's Democratic Party Central Committee (SFDCCC). Her name is Mary Jung. Read that again.

Indeed, PG&E's person in charge of dealing with the City of San Francisco on its energy partnership is now officially in charge of the SFDCCC. Thus, understand that as San Francisco approaches its final action to bypass PG&E under the City's longstanding Community Choice energy program known as CleanPowerSF, Ms. Jung is now in charge of the single committee that endorses San Francisco Democrats' local and state candidates for political office, and allocates SF Democratic Party campaign funds to those candidates.

The Community Choice (CCA) movement in Northern California appears to have caused energy giant PG&E to form an unprecedented new kind of political machine. Failing in its 2010 campaign for a corporate plebiscite to pre-empt the legislature's CCA law allowing California communities (half in PG&E service territory) to choose their energy supplies, the energy corporation is now systematically infiltrating key local and state political positions - positions that give it a disturbing new level of control in state and city politics. Caught ordering highest level staff to spy on energy activists, PG&E has recently asked a California Public Utilities Commission Administrative Law Judge for a protective order attempting to seal details of how the top management of PG&E infiltrated and spied on activists in the months following its failed 2010 proposition to block Community Choice in California.

Mary Jung's appointment signals more than just a new, more virulent PG&E machine, but also appears to outline a more insidious corporate strategy. The story of Jung's election reeks of political manipulation. Replacing the progressive former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, a leader for city progressives, who had retired from the post and did not seek re-election, a mysterious thing happened at the DCCC election meeting last week - a classic kind "accident by design": while many members of DCCC claim to be progressive Democrats, somehow nobody ran against Ms. Jung. An expected progressive challenger to the PG&E government partnership manager's campaign to chair the central committee somehow failed to formally announce candidacy at this meeting - and so, as if by mistake or some hard to imagine consensus, PG&E's government relations person has been unanimously voted chairwoman of San Francisco's Democratic Party Central Committee.

The San Francisco Examiner spinned the story of a takeover of the notoriously progressive committee by a "Moderate," and said nothing about the spectacle of badboy energy corporation PG&E's coup over San Francisco politics. The election of Mary Jung as SF Democratic Party chair would be merely disturbing were it not for the fact that California Jerry Brown's number two and shadow, Nancy McFadden, was hired away from PG&E as Senior Vice President of PG&E, and a woman personally in charge of blocking a major movement by its customers to win energy independence from PG&E under Community Choice Aggregation. Today both Sacramento and San Francisco appear to be under this corporation's political control.

The move signals what the new PG&E CEO calls "finding our way" again after the energy corporation's failed $60M 2010 campaign to block the Bay Area Community Choice movement's efforts (Proposition 16). Community Choice (CCA) is now active in cities and counties throughout PG&E's service territory - to depart from PG&E power to competitive suppliers, and to localize communities' power supplies through renewable energy and customer-owned efficiency measures. Assembly Member Jerry Hill wrote recently in the San Jose Mercury News that Californians should not be fooled by incoming CEO Anthony Earley's brand-new $10 M public relations campaign to make Californians think well again of PG&E, whose political attacks on CCA led to the early retirement of former CEO Peter Darbee after voters rejected Prop 16 by 300,000 votes.  PG&E had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against and litigating against Community Choice Aggregations in San Francisco and Marin, not to mention Sonoma County and San Joaquin County, since the CCA law was adopted in 2002. Prop 16 masterminds Darbee and McFadden decided to roll the campaign donation dice and spent $60M to fool California voters into blocking CCAs with a two-thirds supermajority requirement before municipalities could implement - all across the state. It would have turned a decade-long state process to make CCA possible, and impose a Prop-13 style handcuffs on municipal energy in the state. After losing PG&E's record spending initiative against a hardly funded grassroots campaign of CCA activists at powergrab.info, CEO Peter Darbee wrote a concession letter to the public comparing himself to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, claimed to be working on high principles, and said PG&E would "respect the wishes of  voters." Is this what the new PG&E CEO meant in his new PR campaign claiming PG&E hat "lost its way"?

Because PG&E's "local government partnerships" provide its bastion against CCA programs (PG&E has made partnership funding dependent on not implementing CCA), Mary Jung's role in fighting CCA cannot be overstated, and her election to this post is deeply disturbing. As many other California counties (ironically awakened to CCA by Prop 16) are now moving to implement energy localizations (such as the counties of Alameda, Humboldt, Yolo, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Cruz), PG&E's strategy has in fact shifted to poisoning the regulatory environment for retail competition through state-sanctioned cost-shifting between generation costs and distribution costs to make CCA customers pay for generation costs even if they find new power suppliers.

That is not all. PG&E quietly won major reversals of state policy in the first months of the Brown administration. The company has persuaded Jerry Brown's CPUC Commissioners to undermine longstanding basic principles against cost shifting between customers, and California's only great achievement in conservation policy in the past quarter century - "smashing" the state's landmark conservation incentive system of block tier pricing early last year in the PG&E General Rate Case.  After orchestrating the 1996 deregulation bailout, 2000 energy crisis and subsequent bankruptcy bailout, bullying the CCA movement like a monolythic industrial nightmare, and leading the global nuclear industry revival, this energy corporation has infiltrated the highest levels of political power in Sacramento and San Francisco, even beyond the wildest dreams of Willie Brown. Meanwhile, the CCA Crimes Act, AB976, introduced by a PG&E affinity union, just passed the Senate Appropriations Committee, would create a special new crime in state law that only applies to CCA consultants (like Local Power Inc., my company, which created CCA), who work for a CCA in preparation for implementation of a local energy service, would be classified as criminal if it helped the same government implement that CCA program.

In short, PG&E's "new way" is to take it underground - not to play politics publicly, but secretively, as if to imitate not Tony Blair, but James Bond, or Goldfinger. Given PG&E's claims to have taken a new turn and reformed itself, following the assault it has already conducted against local and state government in recent years to block Community Choice, clearly there is a strong case here for illegal anti-competitive behavior under federal anti-trust laws, as well as evidence of the need to prevent this kind of political corruption from continuing to threaten the sovereignty of California's state and municipal democratic institutions.

Et Tu, Jerry?

There have been some positive developments on the energy front recently. The California CCA Crimes Bill, AB976, was delayed for another year in the California legislature following vocal opposition from California municipalities and Community Choice activists at the legislative hearing. This is good news - no dirty tricks got through this year. Germany and Japan are learning the lesson of Fukushima even if President Obama cannot - that is a consolation anyway. And Jerry Brown has recently indicated that his administration will now focus its efforts on implementation of the new Governor's energy policy to bring an historic amount of renewable distributed generation to California's communities.

This is also good news. But Governor Brown III is going to need some new help, and some better advice than he has received recently based on his public remarks, if he is to pull anything off. He told the New York Times that "(W)hen local communities try to block installation of solar like they did in San Luis Obispo, we act to overcome the opposition." Jerry mischaracterizes the true opponents of renewable distributed generation - PG&E and the would-be power monopolies of California who appear to be advising him that environmentalists are actually the problem.

Sound new and smart to you? I remain concerned. Meanwhile, Governor Brown has remained studiously silent on Community Choice programs in Marin, San Francisco, and Sonoma, where real efforts are underway to bring real, scaled renewable distributed generation to California in a big way. There is much of Northern California looking to implement energy localization with CCA but Jerry's silence is reminiscent of former Governor Schwarzenegger, who liked to get along and go along with the big boys, make a nice speech, hang out with celebrities and super-rich, while having all the right opinions. It is political fence-sitting. Unfortunately, the governor appears to be taking a "Lite Green" approach reminiscent of former Governor (and Brown aide) Gray Davis, with an Obamasque absence of coherence that distinctly smells of PG&E, dissembling, and misdirected hubris.

Bad news started shortly after Brown's election when he hired former Number 2 at PG&E Nancy McFadden as the Number 3 in his new administration (Former PG&E Number One Peter Darbee then shortly thereafter resigned from PG&E in disgrace - largely for what he did with Ms. McFadden on Prop 16). Considering that Ms. McFadden's $46M corporate anti-CCA missile was the ultimate threat to renewable distributed generation in California last year, I could not help feel provoked by this apparent indifference to the actual outcome in California's infamous, prolonged energy policy crisis. It reeks of America's chronic political problems with corporate domination of government, and  I cannot help but think that a contradiction has begun to appear putting Brown at variance with his ambitious campaign materials on energy policy.

Having written Jerry's mayoral platform when he first ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998, I am familiar with the dynamics of forgetting campaign promises, and the Governor's saber-rattling talk about crushing environmentalists like those on the Mexican border who opposed the Sunrise Powerlink, or San Luis Obispo, where activists opposed a huge solar power plant but are actively proposing local distributed renewable generation to actually serve San Luis Obispo communities, which my company Local Power is now in fact helping San Luis Obispo County to analyze. To discuss NIMBYism out of context is dangerously misleading, because Jerry is blaming environmentalists for blocking green power when in fact his friends at PG&E are blocking it with everything they've got. This behavior is not good news for solar in California.

PG&E crushed and marginalized energy efficiency and blocked greener competition ruthlessly while Brown was Attorney General in recent years. The governor knows all about PG&E's corporate governance problem, deregulation, utility gaming and market manipulation, the bankruptcy bailouts, Prop 16 and abuse of the political process, San Bruno, and the rest. But today he shows not a sign of genuflection. He should know how to judge whether to place hope in California's mega-utilities to deliver energy decentralization in California - or to focus his mental laser beam attack on actual market barriers like PG&E that sling multi-million dollar budgets like a six-shooter, not Sierra Club volunteers defending their land.

There is scent of a bully here - and inside every bully is the heart of a coward.  If Jerry chickens out and pretends he can patsy-cake PG&E, Edison and Sempra into doing the right thing, while being tough on environmentalists! Alas, he is sadly mistaken. Gray Davis failed and was recalled because he was bullied by PG&E and the utilities, and didn't have the courage to confront bad actors and use the power he had to force real change on an industry that has totally succeeded in blocking change for decades. Instead Governor Davis tried to do a deal and fake it to the public, and got wiped off the map - will Jerry learn from Gray's Christmas Past?

Ground Dog Day, Again - And a Day Late

Nancy McFadden, author of PG&E's Proposition 16, is now going to become the Executive Secretary to the State's new Governor - for policy, appointments and scheduling. Having fought off Proposition 16 against the $50 Million that PG&E put down to block Community Choice (CCA) in California just six months ago, and having worked closely with Jerry when he ran for Mayor of Oakland and created a strong mayor system there, I could not help be feel a sense of paranoid alarm that Jerry had hired this PARTICULAR woman into his fold. This particular elf for past failed Democratic Presidential and Governorship candidates? What would make you want this? Friend of a friend? Is this another case of inviting the U.S. Military to practice invasions in East Oakland after being elected mayor - suiting the Governor's contrarian humor, a desire to outrage his old base for a good chuckle?

There is something postmodern, even decadent, about McFadden's move from PG&E Headquarters to the Governor's front office. It is like being in a vaguely bad dream. On the one hand, the Governor promised that base that he would revolutionize California with local power - the very kind of change we have always championed - with some 20 GigaWatts (GW) of renewable distributed generation throughout California. California is collapsing back to the counties, "devolving" power by default. On (or with) the other he hires a woman more responsible than any other person (alleges PG&E CEO Peter Darbee) for PG&E's most notorious strategem to block any such effort by San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma County, San Luis Obispo.

For the author of perhaps the most reviled attack on local government in California in recent memory to be hired by the same Governor who will devolve power to local government, how is this ostensibly praetorian secretary to be regarded by those who would approach the Governor concerning policy, appointments or the Governor's schedule? I know how powerful a "scheduler" can be for a politician - even for a gifted one like Jerry Brown. His decision to give McFadden the keys to his office is indeed troubling, even haunting.

So what is Governor Brown 3.0 thinking? I can only guess. Jerry has a scholarly mind that is not well adapted to the platitudes of State of the State speeches. He can make a campaign interesting, and managed to not kill a few good ideas in his first round as governor, but is not a natural executive in character, ability or disposition. So in other words, it matters who his head staffers are and what they are up to. Having McFadden in there is frightening.

Some people put hope in Brown's appointments of Mike Florio, formerly the head attorney at The Utility Reform Network, one of the major pro-consumer law firms at the CPUC.  I have known Mike for many years and think him a very smart, able attorney who is well-intentioned. But what is the program? Does anyone have any ideas what to do in California's energy market, other than blocking PG&E from destroying Community Choice, or otherwise mis-investing in the ongoing overbuilding of PG&E and the other utilities (e.g. PG&E's new Oakley Power Plant) or shift costs onto transmission ratemaking as in the current CPUC proceeding, so as to erect a wall of ratepayer debt, penalties, charges and other shenanigans, and thus kill all that local power stands for? Platitudes or lofty goals aside, where is there sign of a determination like Franklin Roosevelt's when he defied the utility industry players in the region like Duke Power and built the Tennessee Valley Authority? Clear lines must be drawn between aggressive incumbents that have prevented any real change for half a century, and those individuals who are determined that change must come in this administration. This is leadership in a crisis - not revolving-door opportunists.

The Collapse phenomenon is highlighted by the the decadent actions of powerful people, who display their contempt for the public. It is a kind of epiphany, the boredom of Caligula as he destroyed Rome. Sustaining this attack but damaged by Chevron's "Copycat" Prop 26 (which did pass) the local governments of California swoon before the spectre of Brown's devolution in unprecedented mega-deficits brought about by an economy that has substantially collapsed at the real level of small businesses, which employ most people - and President Obama announces in his State of the Union that the economy is coming back because of the Stock Market. Financialization has reduced national debate to cheerleading when a serious rethinking of the American economy is desperately needed. It is a time for clear leadership to force change on an industry that has not merely resisted but subverted California's mandates for years, reducing its global reputation from leader to loser. Can Brown do better?

I was called yesterday by a journalist who said there were rumors that Nancy McFadden is an "environmentalist." I said this was funny, or alarming, considering who she is - undeniably the "idea person" beyond Proposition 16. Peter Darbee hired her to do it just after failed Governor Gray Davis had hired her to handle his disaster of an administration during the energy crisis...that PG&E more than any other caused. To me this sounds like a classic power player, this circassian horsewoman jumping from Governor to energy megacorp to Governor. Were will she jump next? Moreover, what was the Governor thinking?

The reduction of Obama from leader to cheerleader has illustrated the importance of having actual ideas, not just brilliantly crafted slogans and winning smiles. You cannot stop the Great Recession by announcing that the economy is coming back. That was Herbert Hoover, not Roosevelt. You cannot bring the change that America needs by waxing poetic (however polished, thank you Geroge Lakoff) while ignoring basic matters of trade policy or actual infrastructure. The Shuck and Jive has got to stop, and Revolving Door Blues ain't the way to start either, Mr. Governor.